05/31/2026
The Texas Quote of the Day finds legendary Texas writer Gary Cartwright describing the way the Maceo brothers, Sam and Rose, came to rule Galveston's underworld for several decades, beginning in about 1919, and how they built the fabulous Hollywood Dinner Club, shown in the photo below:
"The Maceos had migrated from Palermo, Sicily, to Louisiana around the turn of the century, when Sam was six and Rose was thirteen. Vic was born in Louisiana in 1903, seven years before the family moved to Galveston. In their early days on the Island, Rose and Sam were barbers. Sam, who was smoother and more sophisticated and spoke better English, worked at the new ritzy Galvez Hotel. Rose, who was meaner, tougher, and more ambitious, had a barber’s chair on Murdoch’s Pier, which was a hangout for Ollie Quinn and the Beach Gang. Quinn’s gang and the rival Downtown Gang (Broadway divided the territory) dominated the Island’s lucrative rum-running trade and controlled gambling, which in those days consisted of a few seedy clubs and an operation that leased slot and pinball machines and sold tip books—similar to the scratch-off lottery tickets sold today by the state.
The Maceo brothers began performing small services for Quinn. Rose sold bottles of bootleg liquor concealed in hollowed-out loaves of French bread and allowed the Beach Gang to stash crates of smuggled booze under his raised beach cottage. Sam looked to the future, to the day when Prohibition would end, and urged Quinn to forget the penny-ante stuff and build a big-time nightclub. In an era of great gangsters, Rose and Sam were, so to speak, to the manor born: a pair of naturals, the enforcer and the visionary. By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, Rose and Sam had taken over the Beach Gang, run the rival Downtown Gang off the Island, and consolidated power in a way that even the Island’s traditional ruling families—the Kempners, the Sealys, and the Moodys—had not been able to accomplish.
In 1926 the Maceos opened Galveston’s first big-time night spot, the Hollywood Dinner Club, which they built from the ground up on the western edge of the city, at the intersection of Sixty-first and Avenue S. A consummate showman, Sam Maceo began his tradition of booking only the biggest names in the entertainment business: Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, Peggy Lee, Jimmy Dorsey, Phil Harris. Houston high rollers like Diamond Jim West, Glenn McCarthy, and Jack Josey were regulars at the gaming tables. With its Spanish architecture and crystal chandeliers, the Hollywood was the swankest night spot on the Gulf Coast and a landmark in the gaming industry. Two decades before Las Vegas cashed in on the same idea, the Maceos introduced fancy food, big-name entertainment, public gambling, and air conditioning (a technology almost unknown at the time)—all under one enormous roof.
In the early thirties the Maceos opened a second dinner club and casino on a pier at the head of Twenty-first Street, called the Grotto originally and the Balinese Room later. In accordance with the Island’s traditional live-and-let-live style, the syndicate permitted other gambling joints to operate, as long as their owner understood that they existed at the pleasure of Papa Rose and Big Sam. By the late thirties, Seawall Boulevard was lined with glittering casinos, while lesser clubs were scattered from one end of the Island to the other. Eventually, casinos occupied all four corners of the intersection of Sixty-first Street and Avenue S."
------ Gary Cartwright, "Galveston: A History of the Island," 1991
Galveston's history is really unique. No other town in the Lone Star State like it!
